


Trunk Show

by executrix



Category: UnREAL (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Spoilers for S2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 19:21:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8933479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: After Season 2, Quinn has some plans for her future, and Rachel's.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucylikestowrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucylikestowrite/gifts).



Rachel, who had tipped out all the bottles of pills onto the coffee table, started pushing them around. 

“Oh, shit, really?” Quinn asked, bombing through the door. “What, are you going to eat those?”

“Right now I’m seeing if I can make a rainbow flag out of them,” Rachel said. “After that, I’m keeping my options open.”

“What are you going to do? Just sit and shiver? C’mon.”

There didn’t seem any point in correcting her, so Rachel just said, “Where?”

“We’re going shopping.”

“Shopping? Have you suddenly turned into George Bush?”

“You’ll like it. C’mon.” 

Rachel didn’t have a better option, so she pulled herself upright, and huddled into her parka, the hood pulled far over her face. 

In the Uber, Quinn said, “Pretty soon, the cops will figure out that Person of Boring did it. And, since he hasn’t got any class, they’ll offer him the K-Mart Blue Light Special. And he’ll take it, and roll over on us.”

“But we didn’t ask him. We didn’t even know.”

“That’s a technicality.”

When they arrived, Rachel craned her neck. The lobby was white marble, with a waterfall feature behind the security guard’s desk. An elevator whooshed them up high enough to wobble in its shaft.

“You’re too early,” the receptionist said. “You’ll have to come back in fifteen minutes.”

“Naah,” Quinn said, flopping down in a Barcelona chair. Rachel, who had obediently started toward the door, shrugged and sat down next to Quinn. Quinn assumed full SharonStoneAsana. She was actually wearing underwear, but since it was a flesh-colored thong, both the receptionist and Rachel felt compelled to take a second glance to check.

A blonde with a tragic skatery flipped-up haircut, wearing jeans and a muslin tunic with cross-stitch embroidery, left the inner office. She took a trenchcoat from the coat tree in the reception area. Quinn recognized the lining as sheared mink. 

“Hey, Lara!” Quinn said brightly. The woman’s face turned thunderous. “Since we’re not supposed to be here, QUINN, and this place isn’t supposed to exist, I guess we shouldn’t be using names.” 

After she stalked out, “Where are we?” Rachel asked. “I mean, as far as I know, I don’t need a rich person illegal abortion.”

“We’ll be seeing an identity concierge,” Quinn said. “Didn’t you ever want to be somebody else? And get to pick? Just like psychoanalysis. Costs just as much, but it’s a lot faster.”

The elegant inner office was lined in wood, and the furniture was seriously antique and the tech was seriously cutting edge. “I am Jurgen Grunebaum,” said a dry-looking man in a suit that cost a first or even a second car. He inclined his whole torso forward by ten degrees or so, and bobbed his head once. “I see you are sisters,” he said, his standard line for mothers and daughters. Then, with an imperceptible double-take, he realized that although there was a resemblance, the age difference was not a generation, so he had equivocated correctly after all. 

“Doesn’t that make you, like, Wizard Hitler?” Quinn asked, reading the business card he proffered.

“I am only thirty-seven years of age,” he said repressively. “Even were it a possibility to be descended from a fictional character, it would be generations in the past.” 

“Look at him. If he was any stiffer, he’d be leaking pre-cum,” Quinn stage-whispered.

“I’m sorry, she’s not always like this,” Rachel lied.

“I believe that it will be necessary to construct two complete identities, will it not?”

Quinn put a reassuring hand on Rachel’s arm, although Rachel probably couldn’t feel it because she was still hunched up in her parka. “Don’t worry, I’ve been practicing preventive accounting since the first season,” she said. “I can afford this.”

“I do not expect an answer at the initial session,” Grunebaum said. “But please to be considering not only your preferred area of resettlement but the names and other legend you intend to adopt.”

“Oh, hey,” Quinn said. “The police taking our passports gave me an idea. We took the girls’ passports, so they couldn’t run. You could be Hot Rachel. I mean, you’d have to wear heels and stand up straight and remember to get your eyebrows threaded, but it’s a possibility.”

Rachel stared at her, tears leaking past the mascara that dripped from her eyes as if she had played Gloucester in the college production of King Lear instead of understudying Goneril and assisting the girl working the light board. “That’s no longer an option,” Rachel said. “She’s *dead*.”

“Not exactly,” Quinn said. “I mean, sure, Yael is dead, but Hot Rachel is made up. She didn’t exist in the first place.” 

“Let me get this straight. First we got her killed, then we steal her identity?”

“It’s not like she’s using it right now.”

Grunebaum tapped the chronometer on his wrist, so Quinn stood up; this cost even more than the network’s thousand-dollar-an-hour attorneys, and she didn’t want to throw it into time-and-a-half for overtime. “Gee, I wonder who we’ll run into this time,” Quinn said sweetly. Quinn grabbed Rachel’s arm and pulled her into the bathroom, on the theory that they would have baby wipes in the baby-changing station (conveniently combined with a charging station), and Rachel could get rid of that goddamn clown mascara. Then they went to the nearest Starbucks, because it would be noisy and crowded enough to be a good place to conspire. 

“I don’t know. I was looking forward to watching Hillary being President,” Rachel said. “From here, I mean. Not some tropical paradise Or, like, Switzerland. Which I guess is where Jurgen comes from.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Quinn asked. “Who names their kid Urine? Anyway, if we just stand around here, you won’t be in the nice kind of prison, you’d get shanked for trying to change the channel to CNN.”

Reverting to the sheer pleasure of revoltingness, Rachel blew bubbles through her straw into her Frappuccino. “Why are you even? Why not just do the rat run yourself? And why were you so awful to Grunebaum? To everyone, really?”

“Aww, MiniMe, I don’t like being by myself. And you, Rachel, you pathetic genius, you have a combination of academic brilliance, raw talent, and an inability to not tie your shoelaces to each other that men get awards for and women get shat on. Awfulness is your best friend. Embrace it. Sure, it’ll knee you in the groin, but that’s where not literally having balls comes in handy.” Quinn drained her cup, flung her hand overhead to demand the waiter to bring another one, and then remembered where she was and decided it wasn’t worth getting back in the line that snaked through the store. “But enough about you, let’s talk about my problems. Why should I do all the work? You give me some advice. John is off the table, so should I marry Chet? Then he can’t testify against me.”

“No, he can, he just doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to. And since every five minutes he switches whether he wants to worship your feet or call in a hit on you, I don’t think it’s such a great idea.”

“Okay, delete Chet. You and me and sacks full of money. It’ll be wonderful,” Quinn said. “A whole new start, in a new place, with lots of exciting international criminals.”

“Or, it’ll be like the Jim Thompson thing I read. Where the money runs out and they start eating each other. Us.” Because she was uncertain of Quinn’s ever having read anything, she added, “It was a movie too.”

“The ultimate Survivor,” Quinn said, pulling a pen out of her handbag and taking notes on a napkin. “Our demographic just loves rich people. Especially crooked rich people. Also, what I see, is romance blooming. Because, frankly, there’s nothing else to do. Exciting questions—if you’re using a phony name and pretending you never did what you did, can you ever really open up and trust somebody ever again? Just look at you. How long is it going to take you to get back on the horse after Coleslaw Whatzisname?”

“That is incredibly not funny,” Rachel said. “It’s too early to joke about it. It’s too early to joke about it all century. I intermittently loved him. I think.”

“Your lack of good common sense is what made it possible for him to predate you. Is that a word? I like it, it’s like you haven’t really met yet, maybe just online, but you’re still lunch. Quinn tipped her chair back. fortunately not falling because the back of the chair hit the wall, although that also made it impossible for anyone to reach the line for the john. “In “Strangers on a Train” Hitchcock says that it’s, like, the most romantic thing ever to have a man love you so much he’d kill for you. Strangers in the night, exchanging murders, da da da da da, something goat herders…"

“Needs work,” Rachel said.  
“We’ll fix it in post.”

**Author's Note:**

> Lara (Axelrod) is a character in the show "Billions," whose consultation about a new identity gave me the idea for this.


End file.
